Provincial on Broadway

To Londoners, Shakespeare in the modern theater generally means the Old Vic or John Gielgud; to the rest of England, it more likely means a tireless, 44-year-old trouper named Donald Wolfit.

Ten years ago, having set up a nonprofit touring company, Wolfit started offering the provinces a baker's dozen of Shakespeare's plays--along with other classics --at popular prices. Not liking the prices, provincial managers at first cold-shouldered him. He plugged away, and before the war he was breaking all records for classical repertory in the big provincial cities. When the war came, and he couldn't tour, Wolfit's lunchtime Shakespeare was London's only legitimate entertainment at the height of the blitz.

Last week (after a warmup in Canada)

Wolfit made his first assault on Broadway. His opening gun was his biggest fieldpiece (and one of the stage's worst backfirers): King Lear. Some good critics have insisted that this stupendous drama cannot be performed in the theater, and in modern times few good actors have disputed the point.*

Actor Wolfit played the title role without fear, but scarcely without reproach. Displaying stage authority and a fitful, hammy effectiveness, he made Lear more than Charles Lamb said he must always seem in the theater--"an old man tottering about the stage on a walking-stick." But he seldom made Lear royal, never made him real. And while Wolfit showed some of a road company's virtues, almost all the supporting players in his cast showed only the vices.

In the tedious but far less taxing As Yoit Like It, the company seemed to find its proper level, played with routine road-company competence. Actor Wolfit contented himself (though not the audience) with the small jester's role of Touchstone; his leading lady, Rosalind Iden, played Shakespeare's Rosalind with genuine loveliness.

Discouraged by poor notices, Wolfit, with three more plays to come, (Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, Ben Jonson's Volpone), decided that two more weeks on Broadway would be enough.

-Laurence Olivier (in this season's Old Vic production in London) not only disputed, but seems to have won the argument (TIME, Oct. 7).

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